


Trajectory

by Elke Tanzer (elke_tanzer)



Category: The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), The Man Who Fell To Earth - Tevis
Genre: Angst, Gen, Introspection, Whumping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-03-20
Updated: 2004-03-20
Packaged: 2017-10-02 17:05:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elke_tanzer/pseuds/Elke%20Tanzer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time is not linear for Thomas Newton, and there is more to his story than simply falling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trajectory

**Author's Note:**

> I have a thing for angst-filled self-sacrificing sufferpuppies with unique abilities, especially if they've knowingly chosen to go on a painful quest. Of course, then there's the fact that Newton looks like Bowie...
> 
> Special thanks to Livia Penn for encouragement and beta reading.

They hurt him, cut him with sharp steel, keep him caged with only the basest parts of his personality for company. Dizzy spells take him. Unfamiliar red blood streaks his face, his arms. So many humans are against him, hindering him, distracting him, betraying him. And the few who might not are unable to reach him, or to be reached. He gets lost in their complications and their broadcasts.

If in fact any of them will be real...

He stares into human eyes, knowing as he blinks that the unfamiliar hollow face is his own. He flinches away from all memories of the humans' touches, both pleasant and painful, which may yet come. He clenches his jaw against the solitude and near-madness he foresees, feels a wail begin deep in his throat when the visions of failure crash against his mind.

There are too many possibilities. He cannot do this. Even with the skills which made him one of the few who could possibly save them, even with all his dedication and acceptance of this necessity, he cannot tell which possibilities are real and which are simply the envisionment of his own fears. Before he watched their broadcasts, he doesn't think he even knew the meaning of fear...

Space is so vast, as infinite as possibility, but the timestreams snarl as close as the walls around him, and the power level drops steadily, the only measure he trusts any more.

He screams, and no one hears him. The stars stare silently as his capsule nears the planet of water.

He is hoarse by the time it falls, quivering in gasps as he tries to sort out his optimal path from this point on, through the confusion and jumble of loneliness which will be his lot, even as, down at least one obscured path, he succeeds.

The other paths simply have too many bodies. He has to try.

Clinging to that thought as tightly as he clings to his knees, curled against the vertigo of motion, he thinks he has seen at least one path where technology inspires more than fear and mistrust, where rockets fire properly, where the mission from this planet for his people at least begins... a dim vision or two of the plume of a liftoff, at least one clear image of a booster ring separating, falling away as singular hope rises into space.

The walls boom around him as the capsule's shell enters atmosphere, and the braking begins.

The kaleidoscope of tangled paths will always exist for him. He must see them, must follow them to their conclusions before weighing them against each other and choosing one over the rest... but those paths do not necessarily have to exist for others.

He will try.

The inner capsule splashes down, and as he begins to recover from the impact, retching, he settles most of the possible paths into place in his mind.

Hope will rise.


End file.
